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BMC Updating… Please Do Not Shutdown or PowerCycle System!

We have been having an issue with our HP DL160 G5 servers lately. After a BIOS update (and on one occasion it occurred without any other updates, just a power outage and a reboot) when the server boots the system fans spin at top speed (sounds like a jet engine) and the server screen shows

BMC Updating… Please Do No Shutdown or PowerCycle System!

It would sit on this screen for 40 minutes before finally booting, you can imagine the frustration when you are trying to do work on a server and know that rebooting the thing will take 40 minutes.

Googling the problem didn’t yield many useful results.

After further investigation is was found the iLO software was causing the problem. We are now running on BIOS version O12 7/27/2009 one of the affected servers was running iLO firmware version 3.06. The latest version as of writing this is 3.11b and can be found on the DL160 G5 drivers page.

The update requires a bootable USB Key. Once the software has been downloaded and installed you should be presented with a webpage for Proliant Flash Update. For sanity it is best to open the folder location holding the HPQUSB.exe executable found in C:SWSetupSP44084ROMPaq USB Key. The reason for this is if you run the app from a webpage it will save to a temporary location then run the setup (what the setup does is format the USB key and put the bootable files on it and then copies everything else from the same directory onto the USB key) leaving undesired results.

Once the server was updated with the USB the next server boot took about 5 minutes and had the same message on the screen, you need to be patient at this point (cause I know I wanted to throw the server out the window). Then all of a sudden the fans spin down to normal operating speeds and all is well. Next reboot the server is happy and operational 🙂